What Does Venture Capitalists Learn From IPO Failures?

Abstract

Venture capital investors focus on early-stage enterprises, the market participants have limited information about their prospects. Their investment decisions involve complicated factors and potentially the failures in the past can affect their future investment decisions. In this paper, within the context of venture capital investment, I examined the impact of the rate of IPO failures in one sector on future investment in the same sector. However, the direction of effect is ambiguous. The learning effect from past failure can be positive if the VC investors gain valuable experience from it. Alternatively, the learning effect can be negative as it reveals the VCs incapability to invest in that given sector. I exploit a data set from Preqin and a fixed-effect model to help me identify results that are consistent with a positive learning story. This finding contributes to our understanding of how VC investors make investment decisions and how financial market participants react to failures more broadly.